Monte Rei

Palmares Comes Out of Surgery: All Three Nines Return Renovated

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Wider fairways, fewer bunkers, a fifth less watering. Palmares has had a busy summer.

Anyone who played Palmares this summer will mostly remember the earthworks. The Alvor and Praia loops closed in turn, and green fees stayed firmly in place for a course that was very obviously mid-operation. A few visitors said so in public reviews. The patient has now been discharged.

Why It Matters for the Algarve

The improvements made to Palmares Golf Course have not only enhanced the quality of the course itself but, more importantly, have also added significant value to the overall offering of Algarve golf courses, further strengthening the region’s reputation as a world-class golf destination.

What Has Changed

All three nines — Alvor, Lagos and Praia — have been reworked to improve conditioning, playing surfaces and landscaping. Every tee is being resurfaced with a grass better suited to the Algarve climate and every bunker rebuilt with new sand. A new short-game area and a larger putting green are going in too, along with an entirely new fleet of greenkeeping machinery. (Golf Business News)

Palmares, one of three revamped nine-hole loops

Robert Trent Jones II Golf Course Architects oversaw the design work. Its president, Bruce Charlton, says the aim was to raise the “fun factor” for every level of golfer, chiefly by widening fairways and replacing sand with short grass around many of the greens. Some bunkers have also been moved and reshaped to follow Trent Jones Jr’s original strategy. This may sound like a kindness to the high handicapper. Anyone who has faced Palmares’s quick, heavily contoured greens from a tight lie will know better. (Golf Business News)

A Fifth Less Water

The quieter part of the project may matter most. The greenkeepers will now concentrate irrigation on the main playing surfaces, with the aim of cutting the area the resort waters by 20 per cent. It should lower running costs as well as water use. (Golf Today)

The Praia nine at Palmares

In a region where every summer brings fresh headlines about reservoir levels, that is a sensible line to draw. The fringes may look a little more Portuguese and a little less Augusta. Nobody came here for Augusta.

Three Nines, Three Characters

Palmares opened in 1975 as an eighteen-hole Frank Pennink design. In 2011 Robert Trent Jones Jr reworked the layout and added a third nine. All three loops start and finish beside the clubhouse on the hill, then descend through a 200-hectare amphitheatre towards Meia Praia and the Bay of Lagos. (Golf Course Architecture)

Drone view of Palmares from the sea

The Alvor is mostly parkland, and the Lagos mixes parkland with links. The Praia crosses the railway line to play links-style golf among the dunes, which makes it one of the few rounds in the Algarve where the railway timetable is part of the local knowledge.

Off the Course

The clubhouse, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning RCR Arquitectes, was named World’s Best Clubhouse at the 2025 World Golf Awards and is now home to Preceito, the resort’s new signature restaurant. Palmares has also joined the European Tour Destinations network, and Portugal’s first JW Marriott is due to open on site in 2028.

Until then, the adults-only Palmares Beach House Hotel, with twenty rooms looking over the course to the sea, is the obvious base. Lagos is ten minutes away, with Tivoli Lagos and Iberostar Selection Lagos Algarve for those who prefer an old town and a plate of grilled fish within walking distance.

Palmares Golf Resort with the sea in the background

Part of a Bigger Plan

Palmares is managed by Details, Portugal’s largest golf course operator, which looks after thirteen venues for Arrow Global. Its co-CEO, Nuno Sepúlveda, is unusually candid about the reason for the work: it was needed “to bring the golf course back up to the standards that a place like Palmares deserves.” “Back up” is not a phrase you often meet in a press release. After September’s reopening of the North Course at Monte Rei, he adds, “it made perfect sense for Palmares to be next.”

Gonzaga Liniers, who became general manager as the diggers arrived, expects Palmares to rank among the best golf destinations in Europe within two years, and says that “won’t just be down to the golf.” It is a bold timetable. The course, at least, is ready now. (Golf Business News)

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Browse our Palmares golf course page and book a round on the new-look nines before word gets round, or make a week of it with our full list of Algarve golf courses.

The Algarve’s Amateur Season: A Winter Tournament Diary

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Seven tournaments, seventeen days, sixteen courses and a great many scorecards signed in good faith.

Winter has always suited golfers in the Algarve. The greens are firm, the light is low and golden, and nobody is scraping ice off the windscreen before a 9am tee time. From late November, the region’s resorts also lay on a full calendar of amateur Algarve golf tournaments, from week-long festivals spread across five courses to events with nearly four decades of history behind them. (Clubhouse Algarve)

Bring a handicap certificate. And a pencil you trust.


Golfers walking a sunlit Algarve fairway lined with umbrella pines on a winter morning

The West Opens the Account

The season starts on 25 November with the eighth West Algarve Golf Trophy, three days of competition across three very different courses around Lagos: Espiche, Palmares and Boavista. It finishes on 27 November, which leaves just enough time to blame the greens before the next event.

Palmares is the one to circle. Its 27 holes, redesigned by Robert Trent Jones Jr., run between dunes, woodland and hills, with views over the Alvor estuary and the Bay of Lagos. (SAPO) Espiche, meanwhile, is midway through a two-year programme of course improvements, so regulars may find it has had a haircut.

Overlapping it, our own 9th Tee Times Prestige Tournament runs from 26 to 29 November: three rounds of individual Stableford on Quinta do Lago’s Laranjal and North courses and Monte Rei’s North, with a tapas welcome and a prize-giving dinner either side. It’s capped at 60 players and fully booked, which we are choosing to take as a compliment.

One Week, Three Invitations

From 28 November to 5 December, the choice becomes almost unreasonable. Vale do Lobo hosts its 27th International Amateur Golf Tournament on the Royal and Ocean courses. Just along the coast, Quinta do Lago stages its eighth Golden Tournament across Laranjal, North and South.

The same week, the East Algarve Golf Festival moves between Castro Marim, Benamor, Monte Rei, Quinta da Ria and Quinta do Vale. Monte Rei’s Jack Nicklaus layout comes freshly renovated, with rebuilt greens and bunkers after six months’ work with Nicklaus Design in 2026. (SAPO) The bunkers, at least, should behave.


The clifftop 16th hole on the Royal Course at Vale do Lobo, playing across a ravine to the sea

Vilamoura’s Old Faithful

The Grande Troféu de Vilamoura, held every year since 1987, is one of the longest-running amateur events in Portugal. This year it runs from 4 to 7 December: a practice round, then competition on the Millennium, Pinhal and Old Course. The Old Course opened in 1969, so it has seen a few trophies come and go. (SAPO)

For those who can’t face going home yet, the fourth Sotavento Golf Trophy follows from 8 to 11 December, taking Monte Rei, Quinta da Ria and Quinta do Vale back into battle in the east. That’s seventeen days of tournament golf, should anyone at home be counting.


A tree-lined fairway on the Old Course at Vilamoura, framed by tall umbrella pines

New Year, Same Handicap

The 2027 calendar opens in Vilamoura with the 28th International Golf Classic, 9 to 16 January, played over the Old Course, Pinhal, Millennium and Laguna. It draws amateurs from around the world. Vale do Lobo follows from 24 to 31 January with its 33rd Amateur Week, a mix of competition and social events on the Royal and Ocean.

At Quinta do Lago the same week, our own 10th Tee Times Open Pairs Championship runs from 27 to 30 January: a Texas Scramble on Laranjal, then Betterball Stableford on the North and South.

Five Rounds in the East

There is still room on our East Algarve Golf Trophy, from 6 to 13 February. Five rounds take in Benamor, a Sir Henry Cotton design, Castro Marim, Monte Rei’s North, Seve Ballesteros’s Quinta do Vale above the Guadiana, and Quinta da Ria beside the Ria Formosa. A free day on the Wednesday allows for recovery, or reflection, depending on Tuesday.

Seven nights at the Vila Galé Tavira are included, along with breakfast, shared car hire, a welcome reception, a Vila Galé wine tasting and a prize-giving dinner. Prices start at €1,133 per person sharing.

Spring, and a Spot of Cotton

Spring brings the Vilamoura Pro-Am from 1 to 6 March, at The Els Club Vilamoura, the Old Course and Pinhal. Then comes Vale do Lobo’s 16th Spring Amateur Golf Tournament, 13 to 20 March, and the resort’s Foursomes Week (23 to 29 May) reaches its 43rd edition, having started in 1983. Some partnerships in it have presumably lasted that long. (Clubhouse Algarve)

In between, the 11th Penina Golf Week runs from 9 to 15 May on the Penina Championship course, Sir Henry Cotton’s design, the Algarve’s oldest course and a ten-time host of the Portuguese Open. Three competition rounds and a pairs finale come with six nights at the Penina Hotel & Golf Resort, from €803 per person sharing. There’s even a day off midweek, which Cotton would surely have approved.

Picking Your Week

The simplest plan is to choose an event and stay close to it. Vilamoura suits the Grande Troféu and the January Classic, with the Tivoli Marina Vilamoura a short walk from the marina restaurants.

Vilamoura Marina Evening
The Golden Triangle covers Vale do Lobo and Quinta do Lago. The east has its own base in Monte Rei Golf & Country Club, while Lagos and the Palmares Beach House Hotel put the West Algarve Trophy on the doorstep.

Entry rules and formats vary from event to event, so check with the host club before booking flights. Then let us do the rest.

Browse our Algarve golf holidays and build your trip around the tournament of your choice.

Monte Rei Rebuilt: The Algarve’s Number One Returns on 14 September

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Five months closed. Every green rebuilt. What comes back is not quite the course that shut in April.

The Monte Rei North Golf Course, the eastern Algarve’s flagship, has been off the map since 13 April. It reopens on 14 September. Five months is a long absence for a top ranked Jack Nicklaus Signature design, and the work carried out in that window, goes considerably beyond seasonal maintenance.

Monte Rei main resort

What Actually Changed

This was not a cosmetic tidy-up. The greens have been reconstructed, along with their collars and surrounds. Bunkers have been renovated. Cart paths and access roads have been refurbished. That list covers the surfaces a golfer interacts with on every hole of the round, which is why the closure ran to five months rather than five weeks.

Monte Rei main resort

The Work You Will Not See

Monte Rei framed the project carefully when it announced the closure in February, describing improvements designed to enhance the course while “remaining true to the character, values and playing experience envisioned by Jack Nicklaus.” The intention is restoration of quality, not redesign. Golfers returning in September should expect the same course, playing better.

The more consequential part of the project sits underground. The irrigation system and pumping station have both been modernised, and water efficiency was named as a central focus of the intervention from the outset.

The timing is not accidental. Algarve golf courses collectively use around 15 cubic hectometres of water a year, and the region has spent the past eighteen months building the infrastructure to supply a growing share of that from treated reused water rather than boreholes and dams. A five-month closure is the only realistic opportunity a course of this standing gets to rebuild its irrigation from the ground up. Monte Rei took it.

Eighteen Signature Holes

The North Course opened in 2007 and remains the only Jack Nicklaus Signature course in Portugal. It runs to 7,181 yards from the tournament tees, plays to a par of 72, and brings water into play on eleven holes. The setting does much of the work — the foothills of the Serra do Caldeirão behind, the Atlantic visible to the south, cork oak and pine throughout.

Monte Rei course map

Nicklaus himself visited in 2019 and put the design philosophy more plainly than any brochure has managed since: “You didn’t hire me to design a signature hole, you wanted me to design 18 signature holes, and that’s what we tried to do.”

Reopening Into the Best Month of the Year

September is a shrewd date to come back. October is the single busiest month for golf in the Algarve — 179,000 rounds played across the region, ahead of April on 162,000 and March on 153,000, from a record annual total of 1.46 million. The North Course reopens with a fortnight to settle before that window opens.

Dining to match the elite golfing experience

The rest of the resort never closed. The villas, the spa, the pool and the restaurants have operated throughout, including Vistas Rui Silvestre, which first took a Michelin star in 2019. Guests who booked Monte Rei this summer for everything except the golf have not been short of reasons to stay.

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Autumn in the eastern Algarve is quieter than the Golden Triangle, warmer than most people expect, and — from mid-September — back to full strength. Browse our Algarve golf holidays and see what the eastern end of the coast is holding.


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